What Second Son Reveals About the Next Generation of Gaming

Sucker Punch's newest game, inFamous: Second Son, releases today on the PS4. It's the first title to flex the muscles of a new era of consoles, but for developers, this new generation is more than just better graphics and hardware.

Horia Dociu's first job in the late 90s was adding textures to store fronts in video games. He remembers creating entire fronts of buildings with just 32x32 pixels or a train engine with only 22 polygons. "It was this whole weird abstract way of working where the artistry came through in how you cleverly you got around these preposterous limitations," he says.

Dociu doesn't have that problem anymore. For the past two and half years he has been the art director at Sucker Punch Productions, where he's dedicated his creative efforts to building the best-looking console game ever: inFamous: Second Son. This statement is more than opinion. Second Son is one of the first big budget (AAA) titles to take advantage of everything the PS4 has to offer. Combined with industry-leading particle effects and motion capture, the game is a visual spectacle.

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For developers, the new generation of consoles isn't just about graphics, teraflops, or pixels per inch. It's complete freedom, and Second Son is only the beginning.

Rain, Coffee, and Grunge

The first two titles in the series, inFamous and inFamous 2, followed the exploits of Cole MacGrath, a bike messenger-turned-superhero who must choose whether to use his new abilities for personal gain or for the greater good. Wandering the streets of Empire City and New Marais, inspired by New York City and New Orleans, Cole is reluctant and sees his new lightning-powered gift as a curse. But from the beginning of development on Second Son, Dociu and the other 110-plus members of Sucker Punch knew that the third installment of the franchise needed something fresh.

"We weren't building a game for fans of inFamous but for people who were buying a new platform," Sucker Punch co-founder and technical director Chris Zimmerman says. "Just by our natural impulses, we'll build a game that's great for the franchise. The thing that requires more conscious effort is making a game that works well for people who've never played an inFamous game before. That's where we started—a new protagonist with a new story to tell."

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For Dociu, who joined Sucker Punch during early production on Second Son, it was perfect timing. "Because of the new console, the engine was being built from scratch," Dociu says. " I was at a really good point where I could help shape the direction of the story … this one was almost like a new game."

There was just one problem: the PlayStation 4 didn't exist yet. But in August 2011, Sucker Punch suddenly became an insider after Sony purchased the then 14-year-old game studio. "We had a lot contact with the [PS4] hardware team and were giving input into a lot of the requirements," Dociu says. "We weren't flying blind, we just didn't have the exact specs."

Building Second Son, at least in the early stages, still came with headaches and frustrations. "It was a complete pain in the beginning," Zimmerman says. "It doesn't matter what system it is, if you're working on it and it isn't built yet, nothing works." For a year, the team worked on what Zimmerman described as "Frankenstein, homebrewed dev kits"—consoles hacked together with commodity hardware and bits of Sony technology. These improvised rigs gave the devs an idea of what the PS4 might be like. Once the team saw its first official kit, things came together quickly.

With the PS4's improved graphics capability, the team could create settings, textures, and weather effects with stunning detail that would have been impossible on previous systems. So detailed in fact, the developers needed the most accurate reference material possible, so they chose their own city of Seattle. Dociu described reference gathering as "photo safaris," during which the team snapped pictures of bricks, wear-and-tear, graffiti, even recorded the bustle of city traffic and the chirp of local birds. On the PS4, Sucker Punch created detailed shaders and effects to accurately mimic drenched buildings, fog-covered landscapes, even reflections in puddles. Of course the iconic Space Needle makes an appearance, and many businesses embraced the idea of being in a video game. The city's famous Pink Elephant Car Wash even plans to sell Second Son in its store.

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Second Son's Seattle isn't an exact replica. The streets are tattooed with security cameras and militaristic outposts belonging to the Department of Unified Protection (DUP), the game's oppressive security force that masquerades as a benign protector, and the buildings were rearranged so that powers worked better and players didn't have to travel long (and boring) distances.

"It's not a Google Map tour of Seattle," Dociu says, "but when you stop, it feels like a portion of Seattle. People have this almost phantom recognition … we have all the aspects." That includes "rain, coffee, and grunge music," Zimmerman says.

Every Story Needs a Hero

With their hometown setting in place, the game needed a hero. Where Cole MacGrath was resistant and short-tempered, Second Son's Delsin Rowe is anything but. He lavishes in his new powers and acts with a devil-may-care attitude. His main objective is to free Seattle from the overseeing clutches of the DUP. Whether he achieves those goals through benevolent or malicious means is up to the player.

Sucker Punch signed on influential voice actor Troy Baker, who lent his voice to Naughty Dog's award-winning title The Last of Us, to take on the role of the rebellious Delsin. But a new console meant new capabilities, and Zimmerman wanted to test its limits. On inFamous 2, the team used body capture technology, but facial expression was done by hand. Zimmerman saw room for improvement. "It's difficult to capture all the nuance a human face has if you're animating by hand," Zimmerman says. "Instead, in addition to the ping pong balls and spandex suits, we also captured the actors faces during their performances."

Vacuum-formed masks of each actor's face were made then poked with 168 holes so that before every shoot, actors' faces could be dotted in the same spot every time. Actors wore head-mounted cameras taking video of their faces throughout a scene. "It was like doing a scene while wearing a bike helmet," Zimmerman says. "You get used to it and then you ignore it, unless you have to kiss somebody, then it's a problem. Luckily there isn't a lot of kissing."

The cameras captured high-speed video of the performance, and most importantly, animators could see all the dots moving during the scene. The dots are then mapped digitally into the game, which produces the hyper-realistic expressions and emotions of the entire cast of Second Son.

"The reason it was effective was all that work took the game developer out of the process," Dociu says. "We were able to let the performance be more pure, with the actors' faces doing exactly what you see in game."

Consoles, the Next Generation

Zimmerman compares developing games for consoles to a step function: Every five years or so, the rules change. "One of the reasons that games tend to look better over the course a console's life cycle is that your brain starts expanding—you start seeing more things that you can do," he says. For example, Zimmerman describes how in the first inFamous there were only four tree models in the whole game, just rotated at different angles. "In Second Son, we have a lot," he says, then laughs, "but it's not just taking what you had before and adding more of it, but about doing different things."

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What the next generation of consoles means for Sucker Punch is a platform that's uninhibited, where developers can conjure up a bizzaro Seattle, photo-realistic superpowers, and characters that capture emotion and expression. "The more technology grows and develops, the less technology will be important," Dociu says. "It will be artistry and imagination that comes through.

"I think as a game development community, we're coming out of our adolescent years," he says. "We can make stuff realistic. We've got the tools. Now, what do you want to say with it?"